Jingfeng Cai

Cai Jing-feng, born in July, 1927, is now a research fellow of medical history at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and a superviser of doctorate. Graduated from the Huna-yale Medicial College in March 1954, he had been a resident physician at the Central People's Hospital in Peking for two years. Having finished the training in TCM for thirty months, he was assigned to work at the China Academy of TCM since 1958, specialized in Chinese medical histroy.

In the first half of his nearly four decades of research career, he was engaged in the studies of general medical history of China, especiallly the period of Wei, Jin, Southern-Northern Dynasties, appraisal of ancient medical profeessionals, history of diseases, and history of medical discipliines. He has an in-depth investigation into the academic achievements and thinkings of some prominent ancient medical figures, including Bian Que, Ge Hong, Tao Hongjing and Li Shizhen. By combining the conceptaions of TCM and western medicine, he made penetrating studies on the histry of some special disorders such as infectious hepatitis, measles, dysentery, and coronary heart diseases. He is the only scholar who made trial study on the medical thinking of Sima Qian, the most famous ancient Chinese historian, the Chinese Herodotus, thus, exerting certain influence on the province of historiography. He also explores the history of ancient Chinese anesthesiology, formation of theory of channel- collaterals. On the basis of the above metioned achievements, he compiled a book claiming that there are 42 inventions and discoveries which are the earliest records in world medical history. These have drawn the attention of medical world and quoted and recognized universally.

During the last two decades, he has shifted his interests of study from general Chinese medical history to the medical history of Chinese ethnic minorities, especially that of Tibetan medicine. He holds that all minorities have their own unique medical activities and experiences , on the basis of which some minorities such as the Tibetan, Mongolian etc, have summarized to creates their own art of healing, or medical science. Whatever the size of the population of a minority, when a minority as a considerable long history, has her own unique language and writings with medical works left down, able and willing to absorb the medical essence of other medical systems, she is due to create a unique medical system of her own, such as Tibetan medicine, Mongolian medicine. Moreover, he put forward and elaborates some theoretical problems on minority medicine.

In the field of Tibetan medicine, he has explored the early medicial history, especialy the Tubo Dynasty period and the ancient Tibetan medical painting scrolls, or sMan-thang. He claims Those sMan -thang preserved at the sMan-rtsi-thang( Tibetan Medical Hospital and Astronomical House) are the real original relics. He has investigated and annotated the scroll and published it in English version. By making comparative study on rGyud-bzhi(The four Medical Tantras) with the Ayuvaedic Classics, in cluding Susrutasamhita and Carakasamhita, and the Chinese medical classic, Huangdi's Inner Canon, he comes to the conclusion that, instead of the universal conception that rGyud-bzhi is the Tibetan version of a lost ancient Sanskrit original, it is really a masterpiece of the Tibetan people themselves. He also holds that, in China , a new medical discipline, the history of minority medicine, has now been formed.